Through this quiz, and the answers that appear after each question, you can learn some of the history of the Civil Rights Movement that is all too often omitted from the textbooks. Teaching for Change designed this quiz for teachers and parents to challenge assumptions, deepen understanding, and inspire further learning about the Civil Rights Movement.
The quiz, used as a whole or one question at a time, can serve as a springboard for discussions and research. Please take the quiz, share it, and send us your feedback.

To paraphrase Julian Bond of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), American popular and academic culture has been permeated by a master narrative about the movement. The narrative goes something like this:
Traditionally, relationships between the races in the South were oppressive. In the 1954, the Supreme Court decided this was wrong. Inspired by the court, courageous Americans, Black and white, took protest to the street, in the form of sit-ins, bus boycotts and Freedom Rides. The protest movement, led by the brilliant and eloquent Doctor Martin Luther King, aided by a sympathetic Federal government, most notably the Kennedy brothers and a born-again Lyndon Johnson, was able to make America understand racial discrimination as a moral issue.

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Once Americans understood that discrimination was wrong, they quickly moved to remove racial prejudice and discrimination from American life, as evidenced by the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Dr. King was tragically slain in 1968. Fortunately, by that time the country had been changed, changed for the better in some fundamental ways. The movement was a remarkable victory for all Americans. By the 1970s, Southern states where Blacks could not have voted ten years earlier were sending African Americans to Congress. Inexplicably, just as the civil rights victories were piling up, many Black Americans, under the banner of Black Power, turned their backs on American society.
In its concentration on national institutions and leaders, on discrimination as a moral issue, on the period between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s, in its restriction of leadership roles to elite men, on interracial cooperation, in its treatment of the movement as a great victory and of radicalism as irrational, the narrative reflects the typical assumptions of what might be called the naïve, top-down, normative perspective on movement history. More recently, scholars have been calling for a reconsideration of the traditional narrative. They have raised a number of points:

The Selma Voting Rights Struggle: 15 Key Points from Bottom-Up History and Why It Matters Today

On this 50th anniversary year of the Selma-to-Montgomery March and the Voting Rights Act it helped inspire, national attention is centered on the iconic images of “Bloody Sunday,” the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the interracial marchers, and President Lyndon Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act. This version of history, emphasizing a top-down narrative and isolated events, reinforces the master narrative that civil rights activists describe as “Rosa sat down, Martin stood up, and the white folks came south to save the day.”
Today, issues of racial equity and voting rights are front and center in the lives of young people. There is much they can learn from an accurate telling of the Selma (Dallas County) voting rights campaign and the larger Civil Rights Movement. We owe it to students on this anniversary to share the history that can help equip them to carry on the struggle today.

A march of 15,000 in Harlem in solidarity with the Selma voting rights struggle. ​

1. The Selma voting rights campaign started long before the modern Civil Rights Movement.Amelia Boynton Robinson in the 1920s.
Mrs. Amelia Boynton Robinson, her husband Samuel William Boynton, and other African American activists founded the Dallas County Voters League (DCVL) in the 1930s. The DCVL became the base for a group of activists who pursued voting rights and economic independence.
The Boyntons’ son Bruce Boynton, a Howard University law student, was the plaintiff in Boynton v. Virginia, a 1960 U.S. Supreme Court case that ruled segregated facilities serving interstate travel—such as bus and train stations—unconstitutional. This case helped inspire the freedom rides organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1961.